Legal services overhaul advances in Senate

The state Senate has pushed forward with plans to overhaul the state’s criminal defense program, agreeing to shift the number of cases handled by public attorneys and proposing an increase in the fees paid by indigent defendants for legal services.

In addition to tightening the indigency verification process, the Senate plan would seek to transfer a greater proportion of the public defense caseload onto state attorneys, reducing the number of private bar advocates paid with tax dollars to represent the poor in court.

Critics of the current system say escalating costs have gotten out of control and need to be reined in.

“Like everything, this was a way of balancing the financial need with providing the best legal services for everyone,” said Sen. Cynthia Creem, the co-chair of the Judiciary Committee who helped draft the amendments.

The Senate plan to reform the Committee for Public Counsel Services, approved Wednesday night without debate, calls for public defenders to handle 30 percent of the cases involving indigent clients by the end of fiscal 2012, up from the current 10 percent. Billable hours for private bar advocates tapped to handle the remaining caseload would be capped at 1,400 per year per attorney.

The proposal goes further than House, which recommended hiring an additional 200 public defenders to increase the caseload to 20 percent for an estimated savings of $53 million.

The Senate also agreed to an amendment sponsored by Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr to increase the fees paid by clients for public legal counsel to $200, up from $150.

According to Creem, shifting a greater number of cases onto public defenders will require hiring an estimated 200 or more new state attorneys.

“If it doesn’t save money, we’ll have to look at it again,” Creem said after the vote.

After going through several redrafts, the amendments approved by the Senate stopped well short of the initial budget proposal released by Senate Ways and Means that called for moving toward a 50-50 split for cases handled by public defenders and private bar advocates over the next two years, and capping billable hours for private attorneys at 1,200 per year per attorney.

Creem and Senate Republicans had expressed doubts about the amount of savings that could be achieved by adding a significant number of new state employees to the payroll, and Creem said she worried that 50 percent would create the potential for too many conflicts of interest for public defenders representing private clients.

Both the House and Senate, in their budgets, have also rejected Gov. Deval Patrick’s push to entirely scrap the network of 3,000 private attorneys who handle 90 percent of the caseload of indigent clients in need of legal services in favor of hiring 1,000 state lawyers and 500 support staff into a new public defender agency.

Administration and Finance Secretary Jay Gonzalez has said the shift to a fully staffed public defender program would save $60 million a year and allow the administration and the Legislature to budget for legal services once a year without concern that costs would grow.

The governor recently signed a supplemental budget that included $42.2 million for the state’s public defense program that was in jeopardy of running out of money before the end of May. According to the Patrick administration, the cost of public counsel services soared to a projected $208 million this fiscal year, up from $118 million in fiscal 2005.

The Senate budget also proposes a restricting of the CPCS board, reducing the membership from 15 to 11 and creating two appointments that would be handed out by the governor, one by the Speaker of the House and one by the Senate President. Currently, the Supreme Judicial Court makes all appointments to the CPCS board.

The amendments approved by the Senate altered the initial budget proposal to reduce the board to nine members by adding two SJC appointments back to the board.